비감사서비스와 감사인의 독립성에 관한 연구 = Does Non-Audit Service Compromise Auditor Independence?

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Auditor Independence is one of the hottest topics in recent years since the Enron collapse in the U.S. Regarding independence, the Security and Exchange Commission(SEC) in the U.S. mandated auditors to disclose audit as well as non-audit fees from 2001. In the year 2002, the U.S. congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley law limiting the scope of non-audit services allowed for auditors to provide their audit clients with. Similarly, the Financial Supervisory Service of Korea, which is the equivalent of the SEC in the U.S., is also considering limiting the auditors providing non-audit service to clients. However, the research in the U.S. and other countries on this issue is inconclusive at best and is rarely examined in Korea. As a result, we expect that the research on this issue with Korean data is very timely and useful for Korean regulators as well as academics and auditing professions. This study examines whether or not provision of non-audit service was related to auditor independence in Korea from 1999 to 2001. Auditor independence is measured by accounting accruals. The empirical results show that both the provision of non-audit service itself and the level or ratio of non-audit service fee is not positively related to the level of accruals. Even this study finds weak evidence that the level and ratio of non-audit service fees is negatively related to the accruals. These results suggest that auditor independence is not weakened by provision of non-audit service. In contrast, the empirical results could be interpreted to mean that provision of non-audit services could increase the auditor independence in some cases.